AITKEN ALEXANDER ASSOCIATES EST 1976  LONDON  NEW YORK  DELHI

London

Book Fair

2016

The Robbins Office, Inc. For further information on all clients and titles in this catalogue, please contact:

SALLY RILEY France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Scandinavia. Email: [email protected]

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Literary Agents Centre Tables 18M, 18O, 19M, 19N and 19P

Film and Television Rights For information please contact: Lesley Thorne for dramatic rights [email protected] Leah Middleton for factual/documentary and stage rights [email protected]

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Cover image: Knopf cover for HIGH DIVE ‘Jonathan Lee’s achingly good new novel’ – The New Yorker

FICTION

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker

From the bestselling author of LONGBOURN, a haunting new novel of spies and artists, passion and danger, hope in the face of despair.

Paris, 1939. The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs-Élysées. A young, unknown writer—Samuel Beckett—recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last

cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon, he will put them both in mortal danger by joining the Resistance . . .

Through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely

brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into one man’s timeless art.

UK Publication date: May 2016

UK Doubleday (Jane Lawson) US Knopf (Diana Miller) Canada Knopf (Louise Dennys) Germany Knaus Italy Einaudi

House of Dreams by Fanny Blake

‘House of Dreams is a heart-warming tale of family secrets slowly revealed in a beautiful Spanish setting. A compelling and delightful read.’ – Santa Montefiore

It’s only a long weekend – what could possibly go wrong?

In the hilltop villa with its spectacular views across rolling countryside to the straits of Gibraltar, Lucy anxiously awaits the arrival of her brother and sister. They’re spending the weekend together to say farewell to Casa de Sueños, the house in the mountains of southern Spain where they grew up.

Her sister, Jo, landing at the airport with her fractious four-year-old, dreads the prospect of this time with her family, fulfilling their mother’s last instructions that they

celebrate her birthday party together – only this time their mother won’t be there.

Tom, their brother, is filled with dread, remembering only

the chaos of his bohemian upbringing and wanting nothing more than for their stay to go without a hitch.

Then a beautiful face from his past appears at the villa...

Over one long, hot week weekend, past secrets will spill out, making the siblings question themselves, the choices

they’ve made and where their future lies in this gorgeous new novel from Fanny Blake.

UK Publication date: November 2015

UK Orion (Kate Mills) Germany Insel Verlag

Addlands by Tom Bullough

‘Addlands is a mesmerisingly beautiful novel, a haunting fusion of person, place and history’ - Gerard Woodward

‘Addlands is a gorgeous and painstaking evocation of the land and those who work it. Bullough's writing is a joy - disciplined, observant and musical, blissfully free of cliché’ - Andrew Miller

‘Addlands generously rewards close reading. Its visionary intensity is always thrilling, often moving. Through a succession of brilliant word-paintings a group of interrelated characters evolves over seventy years.’ - Peter Conradi

‘Marrow-deep in its connection to place yet global in its thematic exploration and significance, Addlands does what literature should unstintingly aspire to do: make individual lives the essential stuff of epic. … It's an astonishing work of words’ - Niall Griffiths This is the book we have been waiting for from Tom Bullough, a complete work of art, astonishingly beautiful, deeply moving and gripping from first to last… Zola would have saluted it, and pressed copies on his friends. - Horatio Clare

UK Publication date: June 2016 UK Granta (Max Porter) US Random House (Noah Eaker)

Monsoon Summer

by Julia Gregson

“I adored this wonderful story. I loved the characters who leapt from the page and lived in my mind: I wept at the heart break, and my heart lifted at the hope and the joy…I believed every word and from the moment I began reading I truly felt as if I was there. Astonishingly good.” - Dinah Jeffries, author of THE TEA PLANTER’S WIFE

By the award-winning author of EAST OF THE SUN, an epic love story moving from England to India, about the forbidden love between a young Indian doctor and an

English midwife.

Oxfordshire, 1947. Kit Smallwood, hiding a painful secret and exhausted from nursing soldiers during the Second World War, escapes to Wickam Farm where her friend is setting up a charity sending midwives to the Moonstone Home in South India.

Then Kit meets Anto, an Indian doctor finishing his medical training at Oxford. But Kit’s light-skinned mother is in fact Anglo-Indian with secrets of her own, and Anto is

everything she does not want for her daughter. Despite the threat of estrangement, Kit is excited for the future, hungry for adventure and deeply in love. She and Anto secretly marry and set off for South India - where Kit plans to run the maternity hospital she’s helped from afar.

But Kit’s life in India does not turn out as she imagined. Anto’s large, traditional family wanted him to marry an Indian bride and find it hard to accept Kit. Their relationship under immense strain, Kit’s job is also fraught with tension as they both face a newly independent India, where riots have left millions dead and there is deep-rooted suspicion of the English. In a rapidly changing world, Kit’s naiveté is to land her in a frightening and dangerous situation...

UK Publication date: June 2016 UK Orion (Kate Mills) US Touchstone (Tara Parsons) Greece Dioptra Germany Blanvalet

The Pier Falls and Other Stories

by Mark Haddon

A seaside pier collapses.

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong.

A thirty stone man is confined to his living room.

One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.

Another woman is saved from drowning.

Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox.

A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle.

A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve.

THE PIER FALLS is a brilliant new collection of stories by bestselling, prize-winning author Mark Haddon.

UK & US Publication date: May 2016

UK Jonathan Cape (Dan Franklin) US Doubleday (Bill Thomas) Holland Atlas Contact Italy Einaudi

Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, HARMLESS LIKE YOU is set across New York, Berlin and Connecticut, following the stories of Yuki Oyama, a teenage Japanese

girl who moves to America in the 1960s at the height of pop art, and Yuki’s son Jay who, as an adult in the present

day, decides to find the mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old.

HARMLESS LIKE YOU is an unforgettable novel about

the complexities of identity, adolescent friendships and familial bonds, offering a unique exploration of love, art,

loneliness and reconciliation.

“HARMLESS LIKE YOU is the story of a mother and her son, but it is too an ode to the outsider, a Japanese-American artist who must also create her own, unprecedented identity in 1960s New York. Moving from Manhattan to Berlin, from the Vietnam War to the new millennium, Buchanan’s debut explores the thin line between attachment and abandonment, love and pain, selfishness and sacrifice. With kaleidoscopic prose and characters all too human, HARMLESS LIKE YOU is an unforgettable debut, as rich in darkness and light as it is in colour.’’ – Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams

UK Publication date: August 2016

UK Sceptre (Francine Toon) US Norton (Jill Bialosky) Germany BTB Holland Ambo Anthos

Celine

by Peter Heller

From the bestselling author of THE DOG STARS and THE PAINTER, a luminous novel about an elegant, aristocratic private eye who specializes in reuniting families, trying to make amends for a loss in her own past.

Celine has made a career of tracking down missing persons. Working out of her apartment, a jewel box at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge filled with paintings, sculptures and even a human skull covered in gold leaf, Celine has a better record than the FBI when it comes to finding people. But when a young woman, Pia, arrives on her doorstep asking for help, a world of mystery and sorrow opens up before her.

Pia’s father was a photographer who went missing on the border of Montana and Wyoming. Investigators found blood on a tree and bear tracks, eventually ruling him dead from a grizzly mauling. But the body was never found. As Celine and her partner head west to Yellowstone National Park, investigating a trail gone cold, it becomes clear that somebody doesn’t want them there—that this is a case someone desperately wants to keep closed.

Combining the heart-pounding suspense and gorgeous evocation of nature that Peter Heller is beloved for with a wildly engrossing story of family, privilege, and childhood loss, CELINE is the finest work to date from one of our most treasured writers.

The Robbins Office, Inc.

UK Publication day: Janurary 2017

UK Knopf (Jenny Jackson)

No Thanks, I’m Quite Happy Standing

by Virginia Ironside

‘Full of hilarious truths’ - Daily Mail

Marie Sharp, Groovy Granny, steps into a new adventure

Marie is a year older, but there are no signs of her slowing down – she has a new lodger (into conspiracy theories), an intractable iPhone to wrestle with, and a trip to India to plan!

As usual the year brings its ups and downs. Marie is burgled, which sends the street into uproar. Ex-husband David is still around and getting rather too close for comfort. Marie's cat Pouncer is starting to look rather peaky (her conspiracy-theorist lodger suspects poison), and worse still, it seems Gene is getting too old to want to hang out with his groovy granny any more. Maybe learning to paint graffiti and speak street slang will help win him

back?

Full of Virginia Ironside's inimitable wit, this is a hilarious and touching look at getting older from one of Britain's sharpest observers of modern life.

UK Publication date: April 2016

UK Quercus (Jane Wood) Germany Goldmann

Leaping Dolphin

by Mark Lowery

Written in the author's always engaging style, LEAPING DOLPHIN follows the journey of two young brothers. Martin, 13, and his young and physically challenged brother, Charlie, as they set out on a journey to Cornwall. Memories of their last idyllic (or so we think) summer holiday with their parents are vividly portrayed in flashbacks threaded through the narrative. As Martin's actual state of mind is revealed through the poems he's been writing at school, the journey becomes emotionally charged as they try to reach their destination before the tide turns... And the world goes dark.

Emotionally intense, poignant and funny, LEAPING DOLPHIN is a unique and mesmerising story of love, loss and family.

Age: Mid-grade

Italy de Agostini Spain Planeta France Pocket Jeunesse Germany Rowohlt

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin

A woman battles bluebottles as she plots an ill-judged encounter with a stranger; a young husband commutes a treacherous route to his job in the city, fearful for the wife and small daughter he has left behind; a mother struggles to understand her nine-year-old son’s obsession with dead

birds and the apocalypse.

In Danielle McLaughlin’s stories, the world is both beautiful and alien. Men and women negotiate their surroundings as a tourist might navigate a distant country:

watchfully, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension. Here are characters living lives in translation, ever at the mercy of distortions and misunderstandings, striving to make sense both of the spaces they inhabit and of the people they share them with.

Danielle McLaughlin’s stories have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Stinging Fly and the Irish Times, as well as various anthologies. She has won the Willesden Short Story Prize, the Merriman Short Story Competition in memory of Maeve Binchy and the Dromineer Literary Festival short story competition. DINOSAURS ON OTHER PLANETS is her first

collection.

UK Publication date: January 2016

UK John Murray (Mark Richards) US Random House (Kate Medina) Ireland Stinging Fly Germany Luchterhand Slovakia Inaque

The Maker of Swans by Paraic O’Donnell

‘It is no small matter, after all, to create something - to make it so only by setting down the words. We forget the magnitude, sometimes, of that miracle.’

Mr Crowe was once the toast of the finest salons. A man of learning and means, he travelled the world, enthralling all who met him.

Now, Mr Crowe devotes himself to earthly pleasures. He has retreated to his sprawling country estate, where he

lives with Clara, his mysterious young ward, and Eustace, his faithful manservant. His great library gathers dust and his once magnificent gardens grow wild.

But Mr Crowe and his extraordinary gifts have not been entirely forgotten. When he acts impetuously over a woman, he attracts the attention of Dr Chastern, the

figurehead of a secret society to which Crowe still belongs. Chastern comes to Crowe’s estate to call him to account, and what follows will threaten everything he cares for; it is up to Clara to understand and harness the powers she has, if she is to save them all.

Paraic O’Donnell read English & French literature at University College Dublin and holds an M.Phil. in Linguistics from Trinity College, Dublin. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland with his wife and two children. THE

MAKER OF SWANS is his first novel.

‘Compulsive reading … rich, strange, beautiful’ – Helen Macdonald

UK Publication date: February 2016

UK Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Arzu Tahsin)

The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis

‘A gloriously vivid puzzle of lost identities and stolen hearts, conveyed with the verve and panache of a true storyteller.’ – Liz Jensen

Christmas 2010 and Edinburgh is gripped by the second worst winter on record. People are dropping like flies and the mortuary is full. In a flat on the outskirts of the city an unknown woman dies, unnoticed and alone. She leaves behind a green dress bearing a last few remaining sequins, a brazil nut with the Ten Commandments etched into its shell and a single orange.

The story follows Margaret Penny as she attempts to unravel the secrets of her client (deceased). Margaret has a job finding families for dead people: the disreputable, the neglected, the abandoned, the lost. Or at least those who have died with no one else to take them on. Her instructions are to uncover paperwork, but all the woman has left behind are objects.

And the real story of the life of the deceased doesn’t lie in paperwork. It lies in an orange that accompanies the birth of twins in 1929, a brazil nut that appears in 1937 and disappears in 1953, a green dress that is the star of the show in 1960 and a photograph of a new baby called Margaret, born in 1962.

As Margaret attempts to discover the identity of the dead woman, every object tells a rather different story that takes us back in time. These are stories Margaret's estranged mother, Barbara, has never wanted told and by the end of

the novel the reader will know the identity of the deceased, although Margaret will never truly understand how closely

the dead woman’s story is entwined with her own.

UK Publication date: April 2016 UK Mantle (Maria Rejt)

The Butchers of Berlin by Chris Petit

‘‘Conjuring a wartime Berlin where atrocities get lost against a ground of escalating Holocaust and crumbling rationales, Chris Petit’s nerve-wracking S.S. procedural nurses a dread that penetrates right to the marrow. An appalling, beautifully-lit abyss.’ – Alan Moore

Berlin 1943. August Schlegel lives in a world full of questions. Why is he being called out on a homicide case when he works in financial crimes?

Why did the old Jewish solider who won a medal for bravery in a previous war shoot the block warden in the eye, then put a bullet through his own head? Why does Schlegel persist with the case when no one cares about what is happening to the Jews anyway? And why does Schlegel keep losing his hat? Then one day Eiko Morgen appears in his office, wearing the dreaded black uniform of the SS, saying he has been

assigned to work with Schlegel. Here is another man who appears to want answers. Corpses, dressed with fake money, bodies flayed beyond recognition: are these routine murders committed out of rage or is someone trying to tell them something?

Schlegel and Morgen form an uneasy alliance in their efforts to make practical and metaphysical sense of a world turned on its head, where truth can be bought as easily as goods on the black market, where anyone can disappear into the black holes known as the camps, where paranoia, persecution, and pursuit rule, and warped and clever minds play with the memory of other atrocities committed far away. So how do you solve a succession of terrible killings in a world where murder is sanctioned at the highest level, and nobody wants to ask too many questions? Except for Schlegel and Morgan… UK Publication date: May 2016

UK Simon & Schuster (Ian Chapman)

Film Racine Media The Passenger by F.R. Tallis

1941. A German submarine, U-471, patrols the stormy inhospitable waters of the north Atlantic. It is commanded by Siegfried Lorenz, a maverick SS officer who does not

believe in the war he is bound by duty and honour to fight. U-471 receives instructions to collect two prisoners from a vessel located off the Icelandic coast, and a British submarine commander, Sutherland, and a Norwegian academic, Professor Bjørnar Grimstad, are taken on board. Contact between the prisoners and Lorenz is

forbidden, and it transpires that this secret mission has been ordered high up in the SS. It is rumoured that Grimstad is working on a secret weapon that could change the course of the war . . . Then Sutherland goes rogue, and a series of shocking, brutal events occur. In the aftermath, disturbing things start happening on the boat – it seems that a lethal, supernatural force is stalking the crew, wrestling with Lorenz for control. A thousand feet under the dark, icy waves, it doesn’t matter how loud you scream . . .

Praise for F.R. Tallis

‘A darkly joyful ride with creepy and thrilling moments in abundance’ - Independent ‘Inviting comparisons to Stephen King’s classic The Shining, Tallis includes many boilerplate components of the genre . . . a genuine page- turner’ - Kirkus Reviews ‘Offers the same thrilling sense of familiarity and discovery as stumbling across a top-notch Hammer movie or a vintage Dennis Wheatley novel . . . What we have here is a proper scare-your-socks- off horror’ - Financial Times

UK Publication date: May 2016

UK Picador (Wayne Brookes) US Pegasus (Claiborne Hancock)

The Lauras by Sara Taylor

“I didn’t realise my mother was a person until I was thirteen years old and she pulled me out of bed, put me in the back of her car and we left home and my dad with no explanations. I thought that ‘Ma’ was all that she was and all that she had ever wanted to be. I was wrong. As we made our way from Virginia to California, returning to the places where she’d lived as a child in foster care and a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, I learned who she was in her life- before-me and the secrets she had even tried to keep from herself. But when the road began to feel like home I couldn’t forget the home we’d left behind, couldn’t deny that, just like my mother, I too had unfinished business.” THE LAURAS is a coming-of-age, mother-child road novel from the exceptionally gifted author of The Shore, long listed for the Bailey’s Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.

UK Publication date: August 2016

UK Heinemann (Jason Arthur) US Hogarth (Alexis Washam) Canada Doubleday

Fire by Colin Thubron

A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood. Their landlord’s relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will share their fate.

In FIRE the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his telescope on the night skies. The tenants’ stories range through an African refugee camp, Greek Orthodox monasteries and the cremation-grounds of India - stories that may carry the seeds of their own delusion.

Memory haunts them: its enigmatic flashes of recovery, even its severing under the surgeon’s knife. Their lives may shrivel to neurotic dreams or expand to the infinite, in a novel of exquisite beauty and lingering mystery.

FIRE is Colin Thubron’s fictive masterpiece.

UK Publication date: August 2016 UK Chatto & Windus (Clara Farmer) US HarperCollins (Terry Karten)

A Talent For Murder

by Andrew Wilson

The first in a series in which Agatha Christie turns

detective. ‘I wouldn’t scream if I were you. Unless you want the whole world to learn about your husband and his mistress.’ Agatha Christie, in London to visit her literary agent, is boarding a train, preoccupied and flustered in the knowledge that her husband Archie is having an affair. She feels a light touch on her back, causing her to lose her

balance, then a sense of someone pulling her to safety from the rush of the incoming train. So begins a terrifying

sequence of events. Her rescuer is no guardian angel, rather he is a blackmailer of the most insidious,

manipulative kind. ‘You, Mrs Christie, are going to commit a murder. But, before then, you are going to disappear.’

But writing about murder is a far cry from committing a crime, and Agatha must use every ounce of her cleverness

and resourcefulness to thwart an adversary determined to exploit her genius for murder to kill on his behalf.

In A TALENT FOR MURDER, Andrew Wilson ingeniously takes the facts of Agatha Christie’s disappearance in the winter of 1926 and weaves them together with a real unsolved crime of the time to create an utterly compelling story.

Andrew Wilson is the highly-acclaimed author of biographies of Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and

Alexander McQueen. His first novel, THE LYING TONGUE, was published in 2007. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Washington Post.

UK Publication date: February 2017 UK Simon and Shuster (Suzanne Baboneau) US Atria (Peter Borland) Czech Rep Euromedia Denmark Gads Verlag Turkey Altin Kitaplar Slovak Ikar Danish Gads Forlag Germany Piper Verlag Film Origin Resolution

by A.N. Wilson

A.N. Wilson’s powerful new novel explores the life and times of one of the greatest British explorers, Captain Cook, and the gold age of Britain’s period of expansion and exploration.

Wilson’s protagonist, witness to Cook’s brilliance and wisdom, is George Forster, who, as a young man travelled with Cook as botanist on board the HMS Resolution, on Cook’s second expedition to the southern hemisphere and penned a famous account of the journey. RESOLUTION moves back and forth across time to depict Forster’s adventures with Cook and his extraordinary later life, which ended with his death in Paris, during the French Revolution.

Wilson once again demonstrates his great powers as a master craftsman of the historical and the human in this richly evoked novel which brings to life the real and the extraordinary, brilliantly drawing together a remarkable cast of characters in order to look at human endeavour, ingenuity and valour.

UK Publication date: September 2016

UK Atlantic (Margaret Stead)

The Road to Ever After

by Moira Young

When hard times harden hearts, angels pass by…

Davy David is an orphan, an outsider in the forgotten town of Brownvale. Davy has nothing much to live on except the odd coin thrown to him for the angel pictures he scratches in the dirt. Until he meets Miss Flint. She offers him a job like no other, a journey like no other.

Written in Costa-winning author Moira Young’s unique style, THE ROAD TO EVER AFTER is a Christmas story set against a desolate background. A story of hope and innocence; both a rite of passage and a real, adventurous journey. It’s A Wonderful Life-meets-The Wizard of Oz in a book that touches everyone who reads it.

A boy, an old woman, a dog and a journey. Death might be the destination. But it's never too late to live.

Age: 10+

UK Publication date:

UK Macmillan (Venetia Gosling) US Feiwel & Friends (Jean Feiwel) Canada Doubleday (Amy Black) Germany S. Fischer

NON-FICTION

The Water Kingdom by Philip Ball The Water Kingdom

by Philip Ball

A secret history of China – a fresh new way of thinking about a people, a civilisation, an epic story.

THE WATER KINGDOM takes us on a grand journey through China’s past and present offering a unique window through which we can begin to grasp the overwhelming complexity and teeming energy of the country and its people.

Water is a key that unlocks much of Chinese history and thought. The ubiquitous and ambivalent relationship that the Chinese people have had with water has made it a powerful and versatile metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression. The importance of water for agriculture, transport and social stability has made it a central element of political power, from the Han emperors to Mao. The ability to manage the waters — to provide irrigation and defend against floods — became a barometer of political legitimacy, and attempts to do so have involved engineering works on a gigantic scale. Yet today burgeoning economic growth is placing unprecedented pressure on China’s water resources.

THE WATER KINGDOM takes us on a different kind of journey from that of Marco Polo, which still sets the tenor of many Western accounts in presenting China as a place of astonishing size and strangeness. Our guides are instead Chinese travellers and explorers, poets and painters, bureaucrats and activists, who have themselves struggled to come to terms with living in a world so shaped and permeated by water.

The Water Kingdom offers an essential, accessible and lively perspective on China’s past and present — and its future prospects in the light of the environmental problems it now faces. UK Publication date: August 2016 UK Bodley Head (Jorg Hensgen) US Chicago University Press

How to Write Like Tolstoy A Journey into the Minds of our Greatest Writers

by Richard Cohen

HOW TO WRITE LIKE TOLSTOY is an unusual book about the craft of writing that is as pleasurable to read as the great books it examines. Richard Cohen is our charming and avuncular guide through literature; as an author, editor and former publisher he is uniquely positioned to explore the mechanics of effective writing.

Based on a series of lectures he delivered to Creative Writing students at Kingston University, this book transcends genre and becomes something utterly delightful. Part manual, part literary exploration and part memoir, HOW TO WRITE LIKE TOLSTOY reveals the scaffolding behind our most beloved novels.

In his effort to explain how the literary giants work their magic, Cohen takes us on a tour d’horizon of the World’s best authors, spanning Tolstoy (of course!), Dickens, Faulkner and Hemingway, Proust and Flaubert – but also Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Hilary Mantel and Ann Beattie, Malcolm Gladwell and Kate Atkinson. He considers vexing issues like plot development, character, dialogue and even writing about sex and patiently shows us how the most accomplished novelists can stumble on the path to greatness.

At once funny, instructive and inspiring, HOW TO WRITE LIKE TOLSTOY teaches writers how to improve their work – and reminds readers why they love nothing more than a good book.

The Robbins Office, Inc.

US Publication date: February 2016

US Random House (Will Murphy) Korea Cheom Books UK One World

Killers of the Flower Moon An American Crime and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were neither Parisians nor New Yorkers: they were Oklahoma’s Osage Indians. Oil had been discovered beneath their land in Osage County and 2,229 designated Osage Indians were granted headrights that provided a percentage of the revenues pouring in from oil companies. The tribe, whose wealth was enviously chronicled in society magazines, defied the long-standing stereotypes of Native Americans: they often rode in chauffeured Cadillacs, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, mysteriously, they began to be killed off. Some were poisoned, others were shot of beaten to death. Many who dared to investigate the killings met a similar fate – gunned down, suffocated, one lawyer tossed from a speeding train. In desperation, the Osage turned to the newly created Bureau of Investigation, becoming the FBI’s first major homicide case. Yet corruption from oil money permeated even the FBI and the White House. David Grann reveals a culture of killers in which every element of society was complicit. His thrilling investigative reportage stands as a fascinating 20th century tale of the corrosive effects of oil.

David Grann’s THE LOST CITY OF Z is being made into a major motion picture starring Charlie Hunnam,

Robert Pattison and Sienna Miller. Release planned for 2016.

The Robbins Office, Inc.

US Publication date: Autumn/Winter 2016 UK Simon & Shuster (Ian Chapman) US Doubleday (William Thomas) Germany BTB Italy Corbaccio

Substance Inside New Order by Peter Hook

Having detailed the rise and fall of Madchester in the bestselling The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, and the career of Joy Division in New York Times bestseller Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, iconic bass

player, Peter Hook, tells the third and most important part of his story: the New Order years.

‘New band, new sound, new look. New fucking problems…’ Peter Hook

This last volume of memoir is an epic rollercoaster ride chronicling the rise and fall of one of the most (internationally) influential bands of their generation. Their singles collection, Substance, sold ten million copies and is still a benchmark for compilations of its kind. Hilarious, thoroughly entertaining and sometimes moving, Hooky begins with the painful aftermath of Ian Curtis’s suicide in 1980 as he and Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner recruited Gillian Gilbert on guitar, and re-launched as New Order; being part of Factory Records, touring the world, the sex, copious drug-taking, club life,

in-fighting, falling in and out of love, making money but losing it all. He tells the story as it happened with complete openness. But this is also a book about making music, and New Order were always at the forefront, with their distinctive mix of electronic pop and bass-driven rock they inspired Detroit Techno and Chicago House, which in turn gave birth to the British Rave scene. Winning both critical and commercial success as well as notoriety the story of New Order charts both the evolution of dance music and Peter’s journey to leaving the band, forming Revenge and Monaco and beyond.

UK Publication date: October 2016‘Hook himself is revealed as a born anecdotalist, firing off UK Simon and Schquips,uster (Kerri pithy Sharp asides) and self-lacerating mea culpas like a US Dey Street Books,scattergun Harper …’ Collins Sunday (Carrie Times Thornton)

'Saturated with gleeful hedonism, Hook's memoir includes frank admissions of eye-popping commercial ineptitude, which gives the book a restless energy' - Financial Times Death on Earth Adventures in Evolution and Mortality by Jules Howard

As you read these words Planet Earth teems with trillions of life-forms, each going about their own business; eating, reproducing, thriving… Yet the life of almost every single entity draws nearer and nearer to certain death. Why? Why is death such a universal companion to life on Earth? Why haven’t animals evolved to break free of its shackles?

In this ground-breaking exploration of death, Jules Howard attempts to shed evolutionary light on this, one of our biggest and most unshakeable taboos. Encountering some of the world’s oldest animals, and meeting the scientists attempting to unravel their mysteries, Jules also comes face-to-face with evolution’s outliers; the animals that may one day avoid death altogether.

Written in his familiar engaging and humorous style, Jules’s journey inevitably ends with our own fate: can we ever beome immortal? And even if we could, would we really want to?

Jane Turnbull

UK Publication date: March 2016 UK Bloomsbury (Jim Martin) US Bloomsbury (Jackie Johnson) Mainland China Gingko

Capture

Unravelling the Mystery of Human Suffering

by David Kessler

In CAPTURE, an expert in the science and psychology of

addictions debuts his encompassing theory of obsessive

behaviors, and explores how the impulse to self-harm can

actually hijack the logical mind. What he’s discovered is

the common underpinning of human suffering, derived

from a number of mental afflictions. Dr. Kessler calls this

mechanism “capture.”

CAPTURE represents a tipping point: the moment when

the rational mind loses control. Far from an unusual state,

it’s something that we all succumb to from time to time.

It’s the feeling that keeps us up at night as we fixate on the

details of a past relationship or obsess over the itinerary

for an important meeting . And this aspect of

capture – its universality – is what interests Dr. Kessler the

most. Once he identified it, he saw it everywhere. In his

view, capture permeates the entire history of human artistic expression.

The book traces how capture manifests in fiction,

philosophy and religion. Kessler also draws upon the latest

thinking in psychology, medicine, and neuro- science, and describes the intimate experiences of extremely intelligent, accom- plished people who are—or at some point were— stuck in capture’s throes. CAPTURE is a fascinating anthology of Western thought, as well as an exploration of the most enduring human mystery of all: the mind.

The Robbins Office, Inc.

US Publication date: February 2016

US Harper Wave (Karen Rinaldi) Russia Eksmo

Why Aren’t They Shouting? A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

When Kevin Rodgers embarked on his career in finance, dealing rooms were seething with clamouring traders and gesticulating salesmen. Nearly three decades later, the feverish bustle has gone and the loudest noise you’re likely to hear is the gentle tapping of keyboards.

WHY AREN’T THEY SHOUTING? is a very personal,

often wryly amusing chronicle of this silent revolution that takes us from the days of phone calls, hand signals and

alpha males to a world of microwave communications, complex derivatives and computer geeks. In addition, it’s

a masterclass in how modern banking works, for those who don’t know their spot FX from their VaR or who

struggle to recall precisely how Monte Carlo pricing operates. But it’s also an account of thirty years of seismic change that raises a deeply worrying question: Could it be that the technology that has transformed banking – and that continues to do so – is actually making it ever more unstable?

Kevin Rodgers started his career as a trader with Merrill Lynch before joining another American bank, Bankers Trust. From there he went on to work as a managing director of Deutsche Bank for 15 years, latterly as global head of foreign exchange.

UK Publication date: July 2016

UK Random House (Nigel Wilcockson)

Martin Luther: Renegade and Profit by Lyndal Roper

When on 31st October 1517 an unknown monk nailed a theological pamphlet to the church door in a small

university town, he set in motion a process that would change the Western World. Within a few years Luther’s ideas had spread like wildfire. His attempts to reform Christianity by returning it to its biblical roots split the Church, divided Europe and polarized people’s beliefs, leading to religious persecution, social unrest and war. And in the long run, his ideas would help break the grip of religion in every sphere of life. Yet the man Luther was deeply flawed.

A fervent believer tormented by spiritual doubts, a prolific writer whose translation of the bible would shape the German language yet whose attacks on his opponents were as vicious as they were foul-mouthed; a married ex- monk who liberated human sexuality from the stigma of sin yet who insisted that women should know their place; a religious fundamentalist, a Jew-hater and a political reactionary.

Surprisingly, the man who helped to create the modern world turns out not to be modern himself – for him the devil was not just a figure of speech but a very real and physical presence. The first historical biography of Martin Luther for many decades, acclaimed historian Lyndal Roper explains how Luther can only be understood against the background of his times in a brilliant biography that reveals the often contradictory psychological forces that drove Luther and the historical dynamics which turned a small act of protest into a battle that would change the Church forever and usher in a new world order.

UK Publication date: March 2016 UK Random House (Jorg Hensgen) Germany S. Fischer US Random House (Molly Turpin) Dutch Ambo/Anthos

Les Parisiennes How Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died

in the 1940’s by Anne Sebba

What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris during 1939-1949? These were years of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation and secrets until - finally - renewal and retribution. By looking at a wide range of individuals from collaborators to resisters, actresses and prostitutes to teachers and writers, native Parisian women and those living in Paris temporarily including American women and Nazi wives, spies, mothers, mistresses, fashion and jewellery designers, Anne Sebba reveals truths about basic human instincts and desires. It was women more than men, perhaps selling clothes or merely on the Metro where a German soldier had priority over seats, who came face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis. Some, like the heiress Beatrice Camondo or writer Irene Némirovsky, converted to Catholicism, others like lesbian racing driver Violette Morris embraced the Nazi philosophy, only a handful, like Chanel, retreated to the Ritz with a German lover. A young medical student, Anne Spoerry, gave lethal injections to camp inmates one minute but was also known to have saved the lives of Jews. Mostly it was ordinary women who made life-and-death decisions every day and who often did whatever they needed to survive.

But this is not just a book about war. LES

PARISIENNES is a book about the effects of war and the

choices demanded. For those who survived, how did they

come to terms with their own behaviour and that of others? The second half of the decade can only be

understood by examining the catastrophic shock of the first. Although politics lies at its heart, Les Parisiennes is an account of the lives of people of the city and, specifically, in this most feminine of cities, its women and young girls including thousands who grew up fatherless.

UK Publication date: July 2016

UK Wiedenfeld (Alan Samson) US St Martin’s (Charles Spicer)

Beyond the High Blue Air

by Lu Spinney

'Impossible to read this eloquent, heart-breakingly well-written record of a mother's loss without realising that the people you love are all also standing on the precipice edge Lu Spinney describes so well.' – Francis Spufford

In the year before his 30th birthday, Miles had everything to live for – brilliant, athletic, beautiful and loved, his life was a success story that had only just begun. But a sudden disastrous snowboarding accident changed everything: Miles was left in a coma, semi-conscious but unable to move or speak.

His mother, Lu, explores the nature of self with painstaking honesty as she tells the story of her son’s devastating accident and its aftermath. What is left when all means of communication are lost? How can one bear the grief when a loved one remains alive but profoundly incapacitated? Want what is the impact on a family of caring for a profoundly damaged but once-brilliant young man.

‘This book is a work of the highest literary skill and heroic courage born out of what for most would be unendurable, and wholly silencing, maternal pain. To read it is to feel, sympathetically, both that pain and admiration for the woman who has written so eloquently through it.’ – John Sutherland

UK Publication date: May 2016 UK Atlantic (Margaret Stead) North America Catapult (Pat Strachan)

Gorbachev The Man and his Era by William Taubman

In a little over six years, Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Communist system in the USSR— almost singlehandedly changing his country and the world.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became its leader in March 1985, the USSR, while plagued by internal and external troubles, was still one of the world’s two super- powers. By 1991 the Communist system was in decline, the cold war was over, and on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. In the West, Gorbachev is

regarded as a hero. In Russia, he is widely hated by those who blame him for the collapse of the USSR. Admirers marvel at his vision and courage. Detractors, including many of his former Kremlin comrades, have accused him of everything from naiveté to treason.

Pulitzer Prize winning Taubman’s approach places Gorbachev at the intersection of history and personality, showing how his character took shape and how it both reflected and altered his era. How did Gorbachev become the man who dismantled the Soviet system? Why did that system so readily submit to dismantling? Gorbachev enacted great changes, only to be mostly done in by forces no one could have controlled. Taubman examines Gorbachev’s circumstances and addresses larger, enduring questions: How much power do even the most powerful leaders really have?

The Robbins Office, Inc.

Manuscript due: December 2015

UK Simon & Schuster US W.W.Norton (Jim Mairs) Germany C H Beck Verlag Holland Hollands Diep Russia Corpus

Spider From Mars My Life with by Woody Woodmansey

Fans have been asking me for years if I ever planned to write a book about my time as David Bowie’s drummer in the legendary Spiders From Mars. Sadly, my lifelong friends , and of course David himself are no longer around to tell the story of what it was really like to be in the band that made Ziggy Stardust and what have become regarded as great, boundary-breaking albums of the early Seventies. As I'm now the last man standing, if ever that story is to be told, it has to be me who tells it. My decision to write Spider From Mars: My Life With David Bowie has also been influenced by the many Bowie biographies which claim to explain what that part of our careers was 'really like'. I'm the only remaining person who was there, and only I can tell the story as it really was.

In September 2014 I joined forces with the writer Joel McIver and we began work on my book. I've tried my best to reveal what David was really like, both on and off stage; how it felt to record The Man Who Sold The World, , Ziggy Stardust And The Rise And Fall Of and ; what it was like to come from a Yorkshire town to the most avant-garde art scene in the world; how we toured America, with all the excesses that rock'n'roll could possibly offer; what it was like to be on the receiving end of the tidal wave of hysteria that surrounded Bowie, Angie, Iggy, Lou Reed; what it was like to meet people like McCartney, Elton John and Jagger; and how David and I parted, coming back together as friends once the wounds were healed. Not that the story finishes there: did I ever tell you about the time I jammed with Tom Cruise on congas whilst Jennifer Lopez and Victoria Beckham watched us?"

David's death in January has added a new poignancy to this story, which pays the best tribute to him by revealing him exactly as he was. Being a Yorkshire man I can only tell it like it was, and this book is as it was.

UK Macmillan (Ingrid Connell) US St Martins Press (George Witte)